Re: Fix for script magic.

[Akim Demaille]

| On Nov  1, 2000, François Pinard <address@hidden> wrote:
| > [Pavel Roskin]
| >> >From Autoconf documentation:
| 
| >> --------------------
| >> If you omit the space before the path, then 4.2BSD based systems
| >> (such as Sequent DYNIX) will ignore the line, because they interpret
| >> `#! /' as a 4-byte magic number.
| >> --------------------
| 
| > Let's remove that comment, as well as all those useless spaces.
| 
| They're not *totally* useless.  The problem, IIRC, was that `file'
| would only recognize shell scripts when they had the space in.

I seem to remember that someone had a system at hand which had some
sort of problems with `#!/', I don't recall what kind of problem
though.  Was it Harlan?


Frankly, I don't understand why we are debating about this issue, so
many words for a single white character!

Yes, Automake does not use them and it works.  Then fine, let it
remain this way until we have evidence there is a problem.

Conversely I am used to this space and I find it much better looking
than without.  So there's no reason to remove them, it's not
``better'' without than with.

But in any case, let's drop this conversation: we've had it several
times, and we have more serious things we could debate about.